Video: Former Obama adviser on invading Israel
posted at 12:25 pm on October 5, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Samantha Power left the Barack Obama campaign in March of this year, after a somewhat overblown kerfuffle over her reference to Hillary Clinton as a “monster”. Power advised Obama on foreign policy, having spent her career detailing genocides and international responses to them, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject. Power had some interesting ideas about how to resolve one particular instance of what she sees as a genocide in this April 2002 interview at Berkeley with Harry Kreisler:
This should give us some insight into the foreign-policy objectives of Barack Obama, who had Power as an adviser from 2005 until the “monster” comment in March of this year. He didn’t bounce her from his team over her views on Israel and … well, let’s recall how she described the pro-Israel lobby:
Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.
For those who may not catch the reference, Power means the Joooooos. And why would that alienate the Jewishcabalthatsecretlyrunseverything? For one thing, Power wants to spend billions on bolstering Palestinian military strength, instead of spending it on helping the Israelis to defend themselves. Bear in mind that this interview takes place about seven months after 9/11, when people supposedly still knew how dangerous radical Islamist groups like Hamas and al-Qaeda were. Power wanted to send them money and stop funding Israeli efforts to fight them.
Even more ridiculously, Power’s ultimate aim is to send a massive American or Western force into Israel to stop what Power apparently sees as an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She specifically states that the force has to be “massive”, not like a Srebrenica- or Bosnia-sized force. Why would it need to be so large? In order to neutralize the Israeli Defense Force, and protect the forces of Fatah and Hamas.
Had Barack Obama kicked her off of his advisory panel (rumored to number 300) after making remarks like this, it could have assuaged fears about his intentions towards Israel. Instead, he invited Power to advise him after making these remarks. She resigned only after calling Hillary a monster and after insinuating that Obama may not retreat from Iraq in 16 months if the ground situation changed — which Obama later adopted as his own position after the primaries.
This is the same Barack Obama who served in a board that gave a $75,000 grant to Rashid Khalidi, Yasser Arafat’s toady in the PLO. This is the same Barack Obama who had Robert Malley as another of his advisers on the region — and who conducted meetings with Hamas. Obama’s church used its bulletins to give voice to Palestinian activists. How much more clear can this get?